“The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.”
Karl Marx[Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, 1844]

Wednesday, 9 February 2011

During the current
celebrations of the Centenary of the 1917 October Revolution, the attack on Vladimir Lenin and the Russian Revolution, in general, has been particularlysevere
even by common media standards. According
to them, Lenin was a brutal dictator, and the revolution was a disaster.In his article,[1]The
denunciation of the Russian Revolution in Germany the Marxist writer Peter
Schwarz makes this point “In Germany’s criminal
code there is a paragraph declaring the slandering of the memory of the dead to
be a criminal offence. Punishment for such a crime ranges from a fine to two
years imprisonment.This appears
not to apply to historicalfigures.

If one reviews the articles, contributions on
radio and television, and films to mark the centenary of the October Revolution
in Russia, the principal rule that applies is: “anything goes.”This brief review of Christopher Hill’s book on Lenin and the Russian Revolution is my contribution to the celebration of such a
seminal event in world history. The October
revolution despite what the highly paid lackeys in the media say is an
essential lesson for working people to study and learn from, as Schwarz says
“that one of the most significant transformations in world history, which
influenced the 20th century more than any other event, could not be dismissed
with a tirade of insults against Lenin and the Bolsheviks but required a
serious study of its social and political driving forces”.

So when
writing on such a controversial subject, a serious historian must make an
objective assessment of both the revolution and one of its leaders. Hill
despite being hampered by his membership of a Stalinist party attempted to make just that. He did not always make it. After
all writing about the Russian Revolution in the
middle part of the 20th century was a dangerous exercise for any of
the historians in the Communist Party Historians Group(CPHG) To insulate himself
from attack Hill states that he took advantage of the collaboration between Britain
and the USSR during wartime to write the book.

“I wrote
Lenin and the Russian Revolution in 1945-46, during the brief period when it
appears the wartime friendship between England
and the Soviet Union would continue to prosper, painful though it is to think so today”.

Despite not being his best
work the book nonetheless laid down some markers that would be examined in later works of a much higher
standard. Hill makes this point

“In writing
the book I made a point of drawing parallels between the 17th-century English
Revolution, the French Revolution of 1789, and the Russian Revolution of 1917.
In England after 1660, and in France after 1815, there was a severe reaction
against the preceding revolutions; but 1688 in England and 1830 in France
showed that there was to be no restoration of the old regimes”.[2]

The book
was part of a series called “Teach Yourself History” with the historian AL Rowse
the general editor. Apparently, Hill became a bête noir of A L Rowse who states
"When it arrived, I was taken aback - a work of stone-walling Stalinist
orthodoxy, not a whit human."

While it was
bought in large quantities by the general public, the book was attacked both inside
and outside of academia. John Gollan in his short review manages to attack Hill
from the right by heavily criticising him for his relatively light-minded
treatment of Leon Trotsky.

He accused
Hil of “utterly insufficient
attention was paid to the history of the Communist Party and the struggle
around policy in the period immediately before
and during Lenin’s illness and death. Hence the
role of Stalin as Lenin’s successor, his struggle against Trotskyism is not brought
out. In his references to Trotsky, Comrade Hill correctly presents Lenin’s
criticism of Trotsky’s role at specific
periods of the revolution. However, Lenin did
not and could not know that Trotsky and his confederates, already in those days
were wreckers and plotters criminally associated with foreign powers.

He
continues “Stalin succeeded to Lenin’s leadership, not only because of his
mastery of Lenin’s teachings, but because of his record in the
pre-revolutionary days, his editorship of Pravda, his work on the national
question, his leadership in the insurrection, the decisive role entrusted to
him by Lenin in the Civil War, and above all, his leadership of the Party in
the critical tense period of Lenin’s illness and death. If this had been done
Trotsky’s “History” could never have been included in the bibliography”.[3]

Gollan was not the only person
to attack Hill’s contribution to our understanding of Lenin and the Russian Revolution.
A Particularly nasty one came from the pen of Adam B. Ulam, in the pages of the New York Review of Books. Ullam wrote “ I have hitherto never sought to reply to or to polemicize with reviewers of my books. However,
the review article on Stalin which appeared in your magazine on January 24
raises an issue of such importance that I am forced for the first, and I hope
the last, time to break this rule. The issue is: how legitimate is it for a
magazine of your standing to commission a review from a person, and for him to
write it, on a subject in which he has demonstrated his utter disregard or
ignorance of facts? I could adduce several examples to support this judgment,
but one, I trust, will be enough. Mr Hill is ironic about my assessment of the
Mensheviks. Yet, let me put it to you, your readers, and the Master of Balliol
whether one should take seriously any judgment about the Mensheviks or any
other facet of Soviet and Russian history coming from a man who can write:
“[after January 1918] …the leaders of the Menshevik party disappeared from
history as the coadjutors of the White Guards trying with the aid of foreign
bayonets to demonstrate the impossibility of the socialist experiments of the
Bolsheviks.”1

Anybody with a superficial acquaintance with modern Russian
history will recognize the outrageous untruthfulness of this statement, but let
me rehearse the facts. “In mid-1918 when the Soviet government was locked in
military combat against the counterrevolutionaries and the interventionist
armies… [the Mensheviks] moved closer to the Bolsheviks by pledging
‘unqualified support’ to the government and calling on their followers to join
the Red Army…. Apparently, in return for this loyalty, the Bolsheviks legalized
the Menshevik party in November 1918.” The Mensheviks’ most prestigious
leaders, Martov and Dan, called for “unconditional support of Bolshevism in its
resistance to international imperialism and its internal and
counterrevolutionary allies.”2 Were I to write and then maintain in print for
over twenty years that the Levellers were agents of the French government,
would Mr Hill grant that I was a suitable reviewer for his books on English
history?

In the interest
of fairness it is worth noting Christopher Hill’s reply “I agree with some of
Professor Cameron’s points. In my review I noted as an interesting fact that
the authors of two serious books on Stalin, written from very different
viewpoints, agreed in rejecting the Trotskyist myth without accepting the
Stalinist myth; and I observed that freedom to reject one of these myths
without having to rely on the other gave the historian writing now about the
Russian Revolution an advantage over even so great a historian as Isaac
Deutscher. Professor Cameron, I gather, prefers the Trotskyite myth. This is
fair enough, but one does not have to choose, and if one did have to choose
literary merit would not necessarily be the best criterion. Any myth with the
survival power of Stalinism must surely bear some relation to reality, which
the historian should investigate: this has nothing to do with whether one likes
it or not. I agree about the literary power and distinction of Trotsky’s
History of the Russian Revolution, as of Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion;
but the literary power of the latter is no reason for preferring his myth to—say—Oldmixon’s.

With
reference to Mr Ulam’s letter, it is not for me to defend your choice of a
reviewer. I willingly admit to being no expert on the Russian Revolution. Mr
Ulam has to go back twenty-seven years to find anything written by me on the
subject. For this reason, I tried to concentrate on methodological questions
raised by the two interesting books I was asked to review. The reductio ad
absurdum argument of Mr Ulam’s last sentence, however, suggests an ironical
addition to what I called the “recurrent situations” of revolutions: after
their defeat, some of the Leveller leaders did in fact attempt to overthrow the
Cromwellian régime in agreement with the Spanish government[4]

.

From an orthodox Marxist perspective, there are many more important and better criticisms of this book and
Hill’s outlook. Like I said earlier the Russian
revolution was dangerous territory not only for Hill but the other distinguished
historians in the Communist Party.

Before 1956 these historians were lightly policed by the Communist
Party Cultural Committee this not to say they could write anything they wanted.
As Edward Thompson explained the CPHG largely policed
their own work. AsJohn McIlroy explains they
“ by and large, knew and respected the rules of the game. The CP leadership’s
unspoken interdict on researching into recent history, particularly the history
of their own party, was on the whole accepted by the group. Allegiance to
Stalinism moulded their Marxism, and, if it did not entirely stifle good
scholarship, it undeniably constrained their history. As Hobsbawm remarked, ‘in
the years 1946-56 the relations between the Group and the Party had been almost
entirely unclouded. [The Historians]… were as loyal, active and committed a
group of Communists as any…’[5]

Hill continues the Stalinist
tradition of attacking Trotsky’s role and political outlook during the Revolution.As
Ann Talbot relates “Hill’s sole attempt at
modern history, his study of Lenin is undoubtedly his weakest book. It is
marred by repeated attacks on Trotsky, who is dismissed as one of the
“Westernising theoreticians” of the revolutionary movement. Discussing whether
Trotsky could ever have become the leader of the Bolshevik Party after Lenin’s
death, Hill concludes, “Such a view exaggerates, I think, the importance of
Trotsky in the party.

”

As Hill
should have known, the British government were well aware of Trotsky’s
importance since they would not allow him into the country when he requested
asylum. However, still Hill’s historical faculties would not let him deny that
Trotsky was a great orator, that he organised the insurrection which brought
the Bolsheviks to power, and nor does he avoid giving Trotsky more references
in the index than Stalin. At no point does Hill repeat the false charges that
the Stalinists made against Trotsky and his followers at the Moscow trials.
Even in this book, which certainly hacks work, Hill did not make himself fully
a Stalinist hack. His criticisms of Trotsky are ill-judged and betray an
ignorance of his subject, rather than being malicious and dishonest. He
retained a core of intellectual honesty in a work that was written in 1947 as
the lines were being drawn for the Cold War, which was designed to defend the
Russian Revolution and not to win him friends in high places at home or in the
Kremlin.[6]

Like any Christopher Hill book, I would
recommend the book. Unlike Hill’s other work I would say the reader sometimes needs
to hold their nose. As Talbot says, it is a hack work but is a decent read and
worth reading to see how far Hill as a historian
moved away from the book.